Right, so I went on a new month buying spree.. And got:

Creative Audigy 2 Platinum SB0240 with the Front Panel (Apparently no remote, we'll see)
Creative Sound Blaster Live! CT4760 (Apparently the best one to get? This is for a Celeron 1300 system)
Creative Sound Blaster AWE64 Value CT4500 (Got outbid for the Gold. This is for a Pentium 166MMX I'm building)
Samsung SEM DT-35 Keyboard (Locally rebranded original Samsung - one of the few dome keyboards I actually like)
Generic ATX case with some bonus hardware in it (An MSI 650GX board with unidentified Celeron CPU and unknown amount of RAM, an unbranded 300W ATX PSU, a Floppy disk but most importantly a matching backplate for my P3 board - the reason I bought the case for next to nothing in the first place. Yay me.)

I'll post photos as hardware rolls in 😀

Not a vintage PC but a vintage MIDI patchbay...

MIDI patchbays are handy to control multiple MIDI modules from a single controller 😀

First of all sorry for my bad English.
I've bought this Thinkpad 365e for 20 euro,at a local thrift shop ,because i've always wanted a 486 laptop with integrated audio card.

Well, went back home, the portable pc still had the hdd working and a good working screen, BUT i've soon discovered that this particular pc has internal mic and i/o audio jacks, but NO sound card. I've opened it, and the sound card module is present,but the ess chip and relative circuitry is missing from the board! Bad luck for me! Seems like it was a cheap version w/o audio???

The floppy drive was also faulty, I've tried to repair it with no success for the entire morning. First, just after removing the drive from the pc, a little square part falls from it. It's the LOWER HEAD.. what the hell. I manage to put it back over the 2 coils and glue it toghether , when i discover that the motor belt is really loose. Unscrew everything , and after 1 hour i manage to put it back toghether. THEN i realize that thew upper head is bent and not properly attached to that ribbon cable.

Sigh, i manage to put it back and surprisingly the drive tries to read , making the classic reading sounds,but windows returns the most classical read error of all.
Well, 20 euros of servicing fun at least. It works but it's a bit useless. I'll keep it for the 4mb ram addon, the detacheable 486/100 and the 1gb hard drive(wow). Maybe 'ill find another one with a real audio card and a working fdd, who knows.

Parts are coming in the mail..

Creative Sound Blaster AWE64 Value CT4500

The case also arrived today, shipping cost as much as the case did almost, but now I have housing for my P3 build, and an extra board and CPU for whatever project. I'll inspect the bonus board and CPU for make model tonight 😀

Finally! I was hunting it since 90' when I saw it for the first time.
Now I manager to buy it locally - price was "oh so good" - for that kind of toy..
Complete with box, manual, cards, cables etc etc...

Batyra wrote:

Finally! I was hunting it since 90' when I saw it for the first time.
Now I manager to buy it locally - price was "oh so good" - for that kind of toy..
Complete with box, manual, cards, cables etc etc...

How does that compare to the I/O glasses ?

Jade Falcon wrote:

Batyra wrote:

Finally! I was hunting it since 90' when I saw it for the first time.
Now I manager to buy it locally - price was "oh so good" - for that kind of toy..
Complete with box, manual, cards, cables etc etc...

How does that compare to the I/O glasses ?

Don''t know - I don't have I/O glasses...
When you moce your head in both axis you also turn in games... but some games like doom does not offer possibility of looking up and down... so you look only left and right... it should be better in Duke Nukem 3d

Bought a few things that I'm waiting on arriving now.

Canopus Spectra 8800 -- Custom PCB GeForce2 Ultra card, with box & manual from Japan. Had to use an importer, but I've been after this specific card for years and years. Cost me about $70 USD in total including the card, domestic shipping, importer/buying service fees and international shipping. More than I'd normally be spending on a GF2 card, but worth the premium to me to finally end the search. Photos from Yahoo Auction:

Voodoo5 5500 PCI -- self explanatory. Was listed on eBay as tested and working for $50 USD. Couldn't say no. Hopefully it actually does work. Photo from eBay:

Also picked up some 40/60GB IDE HDDs for $2 AUD each locally. All Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9. Never know when a HDD could come in handy.

@ x0zm_

That voodoo5 is one HELL of a good deal.

@ x0zm great job!

Bought a sapphire x850xt platinum edition complete with box. Came with original cooler and zalman, works fine.
Also bought a Asus gf4 ti4600 but this one has artifacts and is probably dead.

Have a lot of Nvidia agp cards but can't seem to find a working specimen of a ti4600 (don't use ebay, only locally). Ti4200 are usually fine, i don't know if it is due to overclocking or that the 4600 cards were clocked a bit too high from factory when it comes to the memory chips.

Bought a few old Linux distribs:

luckybob wrote:

@ x0zm_

That voodoo5 is one HELL of a good deal.

For eBay. That is a grate price.

lolo799 wrote:

Bought a few old Linux distribs: […]
Show full quote

Bought a few old Linux distribs:

redhatlinux3.JPG

turbolinux6.jpg

unifix15.JPG

Bought? I thought the idea of Linux was free software and what not?

Jade Falcon wrote:

lolo799 wrote:

Bought a few old Linux distribs: […]
Show full quote

Bought a few old Linux distribs:

redhatlinux3.JPG

turbolinux6.jpg

unifix15.JPG

Bought? I thought the idea of Linux was free software and what not?

I like pressed CDs, large paper manuals and boxes, so yes, bought!

boxes and materials are not free plus it is not that uncommon to get a physical copy to support development...

Well, Red Hat Linux is a paid product.

keenmaster486 wrote:

Well, Red Hat Linux is a paid product.

It was not until after 6.0 when they did away with RedHat and went ahead with RedHat Enterprise. The Fedora project today is a free RedHat linux fork maintained by RedHat so its essentially still free.

RH9 was the last freely available ISO. The Redhat release model was changed in late 2003 to Fedora releases which then fed into RHEL.

Sorry but RHEL is free. You can download it off there site source code and all. How do you think cent OS was made?
Support and access to the RHEL repository is what's not free.

You have to setup a free red hat account and your good. You get 30 days of free support and access to the RHEL repository, after that your on your own, have to pay or will have to use a 3rd party repository.
https://access.redhat.com/downloads/

RHEL is not free (as in cost)[*]. RHEL comes with Redhat commercial support. Redhat does not provide official install images for free. The source code packages are free. They're the basis of CentOS and Scientific Linux. However, Redhat won't provide official compiled packages to people other than customers.

It's worth noting that this approach is entirely compatible with requirements of the GPL.

[*] RHEL does provide no cost licenses to qualifying developers, but this restricts usage from production.